The present invention relates to a system and a method employed in that system for recognizing and identifying characters based upon intelligence signals which are obtained during scanning operations.
In the past, one way of reading and recognizing normalized characters written on an appropriate record medium such as an embossed card is to establish a memory storing all of two-dimentional intelligence signals being obtained during the scanning process and then to recognize characters from the two-dimentional intelligence signals contained in the memory. Therefore, in order to recognize the individual normalized characters, it is required to provide a large number of memory cells, which result in a complicated recognition circuit and a full-sized reader arrangement.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide an effective character recognition system requiring a considerably simpler and more inexpensive memory requirement.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an improved character recognition system which can simplify an information manipulation and recognition arrangement required for scanning, reading and recognizing normalized characters registered on a record medium.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide an improved character recognition system which can operate without regard to variations in relative positions between a reading station and normalized characters to be recognized.
To achieve the above-described objects, the present invention resides in the system which employs both a characteristic extraction method and an information compression method. That is to say, while the normalized characters are being scanned and read for example in the vertical direction, characteristics of the characters in the vertical direction are determined in an information compression mode each scanning operation. Variations of the determined characteristics in the horizontal direction are also viewed by a repetition of the scanning operations so that the two-dimentional characteristics are derived and confirmed therefrom upon the completion of the scanning operations. The determination of these variations in the horizontal direction is carried out during a specified number of scanning cycles which corresponds to the characteristics to be viewed in the horizontal direction.